Reading skills of American fourth-graders are on the rise, according to test scores released earlier this year. That's the good news.
Still, less than a third of all fourth-graders - and only 10% of black fourth-graders -can read at a level experts deem ''proficient.''
Teaching phonics in early grades is the best way to attack this illiteracy crisis, as several major studies have shown. But that doesn't mean it's being taught in every local school.
Even California - where three years ago lawmakers mandated phonics as a way to improve the state's last-in-the-nation reading scores - is finding that it's easier to pass a mandate than it is to change a classroom.
Years of hostility to phonics by education schools has made teacher training a missing link between policy and practice. Few teachers know how to teach phonics. And some teachers must still use materials that don't include phonics.
That could soon change. California is pulling out all the stops to get phonics into the classroom. Along with the mandates to teach phonics, lawmakers set aside massive funds for new phonics-based teacher training as well as new school materials. And state authorities who accredit schools of education are putting their reading programs under a microscope.
Still, plenty of ed-school professors are resisting these mandates. They say these rules can hinder academic freedom and don't let them discover the best teaching methods. Some also say they need more money for teaching materials and more time to train would-be teachers.
Nancy Ichinaga, principal of Bennett-Kew Elementary School in Inglewood, sees few candidates for teaching slots who know how to teach phonics. ''There are a few college professors who teach phonics well, but you can count them on one hand,'' she said.
So Ichinaga and the rest of the Inglewood School District are using a grant from the Los Altos-based Packard Foundation to train a reading coach in a phonics program published by Open Court. Over the past two years, the Packard Foundation has spent over $5 million training California teachers in this program.
The state is spending millions on phonics training. This year, it will spend $6 million for new teachers in kindergarten through third grade, on top of the $27 million it spent last year. It will spend another $31 million this year for remedial reading teachers in fourth grade through eighth grade.
That certainly suits Bill Honig, the state's former superintendent of public instruction, whose Consortium on Reading Excellence is busy training 18,000 of those teachers. Honig points out that ed-school graduates should already be trained to do this - though many aren't.
In 1996, California's Commission on Teacher Credentialing tried to figure out whether ed schools were teaching phonics. It asked each California State University campus ed school (the source of about 60% of the state's teachers) to send in a syllabus for its reading courses. Four in five refused to do so.
Based on the response it did receive, the CTC found phonics wasn't being accurately taught in ed schools.
Lawmakers promptly mandated that publicly funded ed schools include training in phonics. The CSU Academic Senate promptly voted to condemn the state government for meddling with its academic freedom.
''Significant changes are being made,'' said Jim Shanker, education professor at CSU, Hayward.
''But most professors have academic freedom,'' he said, ''o) they are still fans of other approaches, and they are still miseducating future teachers.''
The CTC is reviewing education programs to make sure phonics is part of required course work. And some say those reviews are strict enough to keep an ed school from graduating elementary school teachers who don't know how to teach phonics.
''Given the CTC's strictures to meet state content standards, I don't see how that could be the prevailing outcome,'' said Adria Klein, an education professor at CSU, San Bernardino, and head of a ''Reading Recovery'' teacher-training center.
(Reading Recovery is an expensive, yet widely used, remedial reading program that uses many elements of a whole-language approach.)
''But I am unwilling to have a one-size-fits-all curriculum,'' said Klein, who teaches both phonics and whole language.
The current call for a ''balanced'' reading curriculum that uses both phonics and whole language makes it hard for some potential teachers to get enough training in either. ''If you want a perfect system, give us more time to prepare teachers,'' Klein said.
Others say the call for a ''balanced'' curriculum is giving some ed schools too much wiggle room, allowing them to avoid teaching phonics.
How so? Some, like Klein, teach phonics as one of many equal tools to teach reading.
Or they teach phonics implicitly, says Marion Joseph, a phonics advocate on the state school board. ''The question is whether you are teaching phonics explicitly,'' she said. ''Are you teaching kids a skill they can generalize?''
How do the methods differ? In an explicit approach, kids learn what sound goes with the letter ''m,'' and then practice reading a number of words with that sound. In an implicit approach, kids read a passage, and then have to find a word that started with an ''m.''
That difference may sound as important as knowing the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. But it does matter.
A 1998 study by the National Institutes of Health found that an implicit phonics approach worked no better than whole language for many kids -and nowhere near as well for all kids as an explicit approach to phonics.
Shanker of CSU, Hayward, has doubts about how far the state should go in mandating teacher education programs. He taught phonics throughout the years whole language was the latest teaching fad. He says CSU's commitment to academic freedom let him do that.
The state may be throwing a lot of money at phonics training. Still, some find it tough to get rid of whole language.
Take a recent episode in Los Angeles. When 2,500 teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District signed up for a day of training, they were supposed learn how to use phonics to bring second-graders and third- graders up to speed.
Yet little of the course materials dealt with phonics. The rest were based on the whole-language approach the state has rejected. A teacher complaint prompted LAUSD Superintendent Ruben Zacarias to promise an overhaul of training materials.
New teachers who want a license to teach in elementary and middle schools also have to pass a test that measures how they teach reading. The written version includes questions on phonics.
The first time the test was given this year, 1,400 took it. Four in five passed - proof, some say, that ed schools are doing their job.
Phonics backers don't believe it.
Patrick Groff, an education professor at CSU, San Diego, points out that the licensing test doesn't emphasize phonics.
In part, that's because the test has to include items for teachers in higher grades, where phonics isn't as important. But it also reflects the views of the test's specifications, he says, which were created with the help of whole-language advocates.
The high pass rate may show that ed students know the concepts behind phonics, Honig says. ''But that doesn't mean that kids coming out of there (passing the test) know . . . how to teach phonics and how to use phonics to diagnose reading problems,'' he added.
Joseph thinks many of these arguments will fade. Next week, the state board is expected to adopt a new set of reading curricula focused on phonics -and drop others that don't teach phonics explicitly.
That's likely to be welcome news to Ann Edwards, a first-grade teacher at Blandford Elementary in Los Angeles County. Throughout the 1990s, the school resisted whole language in favor of a phonics program.
Yet last year, she and other teachers at Blandford were required by the school district to start using another program that she felt was whole language. The principal nixed her request to continue using the phonics materials left over from previous years.
''It's frustrating to watch the kids, because they're just not getting it,'' Edwards said. ''The district thinks it's in line with California standards, but (the program's) not explicit and systematic phonics.''
That dispute hasn't been settled. But by a 12-to-1 vote last week, the state Curriculum Review Commission urged the state board to drop the whole-language part of the program Edwards was required to use from the list of approved curricula.